Sense
by Sparks
Summary: Confusion is all of the mind. So is he, but that doesn't stop her talking to him.
1. Sense

Title: Sense

Rating: K+

Disclaimer: None of this is mine.

Notes: Confusion is all in the mind. So is he.

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"Some things don't make sense," she said, standing on the beach. The waves lapped at her feet, shifting sand so she sank a little with every wash of salty water. Her hair was caught by the wind, and whipped at her cheeks.

"Some things don't have to," he offered. He stood behind her, arms folded, watching her almost idly.

"But I think they should."

"You cannot order your existence with thoughts. Some things are, and some things are not. Sense is an illusion."

She looked over her shoulder at him for a moment, then returned her gaze to the ocean. "Some people would argue that our existence is only made so by conscious thought," she reminded him.

"That isn't you talking."

"No, you're right," she conceded. "But that doesn't mean to say they're not right."

"Do you think they are?" he asked her gently.

"No." The answer tripped out of her mouth. "No, I think everything is. That we can think doesn't change that. It would all still be there if we couldn't think. I mean," and a slow smile spread across her face, "what about coma patients and stuff?"

"And stuff," he repeated disdainfully. "Indeed."

"But that doesn't mean things make sense," she said, returning to her original point. "And I don't understand it."

"You wouldn't, would you," he pointed out. "If they don't make sense."

"You're confusing me," she whispered. "You always do that. You confuse me."

"Confusion is all in the mind," he said sagely.

She laughed, an easy laugh that was heard far too rarely. "You should know. You cause enough of it in mine."

"Your mind is a dangerous place," he said quietly. "I would not dream of deliberately causing you more confusion."

"You don't dream. You have nightmares. You wake screaming in the night, and no one comes because you make sure you only sleep in soundproofed rooms. Tattooed numbers on your arm, yellow stars sewn onto all your clothing, your mother being taken screaming to the gas chambers."

"Stop it," he said harshly. "Those aren't your memories, Marie, stop it."

"But I can't," she whispered. "Don't you see? The screams in the death camps ring in my ears."

"You never heard them, Marie."

"But I will." She turned now, facing him, her back to the vast expanse of ocean and horizon. "You've taught me that. It's coming, Erik. Hordes of mutant-haters, wanting to brand us like cattle and lock us in camps and deny us every basic human right. Little food and water, because we're little more than animals, and we aren't useful like cattle or dogs, so why bother feed us? Why bother with medical treatment? They don't care if we die, and if we live we're dangerous. Numbers on our arms or on our foreheads so everyone can see what we are. Degraded. Not human, not worth anything." She stopped to catch her breath, and looked surprised at her outburst. "That's you talking," she whispered finally.

"No, Marie, that's you," he said gently. "You believe it."

"But what I believe may not be real," she whispered. "So much of life is confusing, Erik."

"That is true."

"Truth is in the eye of the beholder," she murmured, her Southern drawl returning slowly to her voice. "Or is that beauty?"

"Perhaps," Erik offered, "it is both."

"Rogue!"

She looked up, startled, to see Cyclops coming towards her.

"Rogue, we've been looking for you," he said, sounding more than a little pissed off. "We're leaving soon. Don't you have a watch?"

"Every time I put on a watch, my body's magnetic field makes it go crazy," Marie drawled. He stopped a few meters away from her, and she thought he frowned. It was hard to tell, with his sunglasses. "Sorry. Didn't know it was getting so late."

"What are you doing all the way over here?" Cyclops wanted to know. She held out her hands, showing him bare skin. She indicated her feet as well. "Ah."

"Couldn't risk it around the kids," she said. "They're scared of me." Cyclops began to make a token protest, but she shook her head with a faint smile. "It's alright. They should be." She turned and washed her hands in the surf, then took her gloves from her pocket and put them on. Long opera gloves that reached up to her upper arm. She picked up her flip-flops and glanced around to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything.

"I'm not scared of you, Marie," Erik told her sadly.

She didn't answer the phantom of her mind as she followed her teacher back to the school bus, and the crowds of excited children there.

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	2. Thoughts

Title: Sense

Chapter Title: Thoughts

Rating K+

Notes: He is part of her, but different.

* * *

She sat at the desk in her room – she'd been given a private room after Liberty Island – and struggled with her homework. He sat on her bed, watching her, his fingers laced together. 

"I could help," he said, not for the first time.

"'As soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all,'" she murmured, and threw a pencil at him.

"Please do not quote Oscar Wilde at me," he said with dignity. "You wouldn't know it, if not for me."

"Charles lent me some of his plays," she told him.

"Only because you had quotations in your mind," he sniffed. "And since when do you call him Charles?"

"Since you," she said wryly. She looked up at him. "Please. I have to get this done. I've got an exam next week."

"Exams are pointless," he said scornfully.

"And if I let you help, the Professor will know," she pointed out. He gazed evenly at her; she shook her head in exasperation and tried to return her concentration to the problem at hand. He kept watching her. She fidgeted under the intense stare.

"Stop it," she said at last. "I can't think when you do that." He said nothing, but rose and came to read over her shoulder. She let him, and then her pen flew across the paper, solving the equation effortlessly and in a handwriting not her own.

"There, you see? Wasn't that easier."

"Maybe easier, but it wasn't necessarily right," she muttered. She dated the paper, and signed her name to the bottom with a flourish, the 'r' and the 'g' twirling.

"'Friendship is essentially a partnership,'" he pointed out.

"We're not friends," she said wryly. "And Aristotle didn't know us."

"Very well. How about, 'in politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships,'" he offered.

"Tocqueville. Hardly relevant," she snorted, and reached for her history textbook. "Now hush up. I do want to get my high school diploma, you know."

"You wish to conform," he said, dangerously mild. "I comprehend perfectly."

"I don't want to be like other people," she protested. "Not really. But without qualifications, there's nothing I can do."

"There's nothing you can do anyway," he pointed out. She stiffened and didn't look at him. "Oh, come now, Rogue. You didn't really think you had a future among the humans, did you? You cannot touch them. How would you attain a degree? What job would you have? What career options?" He shook his head pityingly. "Don't be so naïve."

"There are correspondence courses," she began hotly.

"Don't fool yourself, child," he thundered. "Even if you completed a degree, what would you do with it?"

"Not everyone hates mutants," she snapped.

"Enough do!"

They stared at each other; she was breathing heavily.

"If you were real," she whispered at last, "I would slap you."

"If I were real, you wouldn't need to," he murmured. "We'd be doing other things."

She turned away and focused on her history text. For long moments there was silence. Then:

"'Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but with greatness of mind.'"

She smiled despite herself. "Yes, but Aristotle lived in a world without mutants."

"Very well," he conceded. "Something more modern, then. 'Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.'"

She glanced at him incredulously. "You've seen Star Wars?"

He looked disdainful. "No. That I plucked from your mind, my dear."

"It's true though. Isn't it." It wasn't a question. She was staring at the pictures in the pages of her history book. He moved to look, then had to turn away swiftly.

"They were scared. They were terrified and they had no way out." She closed her eyes, determined not to cry.

He closed the book. "Marie, you must stop this," he said gently and firmly. "These are not your memories. You did not live through the Holocaust. You have never seen a concentration camp, and I hope you never will."

"But I still remember," she whispered forlornly. "It's all there in my head, and not just that. Everything, Erik, I remember everything." She looked up at him. "Charles said it would fade, but it hasn't."

"No," he nodded. "It hasn't." He waited a beat. "Do you wish it had?"

"I – I don't know," she said slowly. "I could do without the nightmares."

"But you enjoy my company," he guessed astutely. "Ah, my dear Marie. I'm all in your head, you know."

"I know that," she muttered, almost sullenly. "I'm insane, right?"

"Not quite," he said. His hand rested gently for a moment on her head, and she almost thought she could feel the weight of it pressing against her hair. "I think your mind is a dangerous and unique thing."

"Unique." She tossed the word aside as useless. "What's the good in being unique if you can't do anything? You're right, Erik, I'm never gonna be anything."

"I didn't mean to make you so despondent," he offered. "There are things you could do, I suppose."

"I could teach here," she nodded after a moment. "Jean suggested that." Her lip curled. "Be stuck here in Mutant High for the rest of my life. I don't think I could stand it. They'll always see me as poor, helpless little Marie."

"I see Rogue."

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	3. Minds

Title: Sense

Chapter Title: Minds

Rating: K+

Notes: It's hard to pit a mind against itself.

* * *

She bought a chess set, on one of her rare visits to the mall, and set it up on one of the tables in the garden. It was a beautiful set, wood inlaid with metal, and her bare fingers caressed each piece as she laid it out.

It was a sunny day, but she was in a secluded part of the garden, and she hadn't told anyone where she was. The sounds of the children playing filtered through the bushes and trees.

"And how," he drawled, "do you intend on playing chess?"

"You're going to play me," she said simply, not looking at him. "White or black?"

"You can only play with what you know of me," he pointed out. "Your moves are my moves."

"I can play as myself," she muttered. She reached out and moved a pawn two spaces forward. He sat opposite her and tapped his fingers on the table for a moment. "Please play," she said then, almost pleadingly. "I have these moves in my head…black and white, pawn, king, knight…please, I need to play."

"Very well."

He beat her in ten moves, and she frowned thoughtfully at the board.

"I don't understand," she said.

"You've said that before," he observed wryly. "What is it this time?"

"How can you beat me, if we've got the exact same knowledge in our head? We've read the same books, we've played the same games." She lifted her hand, and the white queen rose in response. "We're the same, how can you beat me?"

"We're not the same, Marie," he said firmly. "You have an imprint of me in your mind, but you are not me."

"I feel like I am, sometimes," she whispered. "I was bored, in English class earlier…" She lifted her sleeve to show him the numbers inked onto her arm with felt-tip. One, four, nine, eight, two. He inhaled sharply. "I didn't know I was doing it until it was there, on my arm," she told him.

"You've go to stop this, Marie," he told her. "You are not me."

"Hey, at least I'm not going around smoking and drinking," she pointed out. "I wanted to, for a while."

"Yes, but you didn't touch Wolverine for nearly as long as you were touching me," he reminded her. "Much as it pains me to say it, I think you should talk to Charles."

"And have him mess with my mind?" she retorted. "I don't think so." She waved her hand, and the pieces rearranged themselves on the board. "I've got enough voices in my head."

"Wolverine, and that boy. What was his name?"

"You know very well," she said tiredly. She rested her head on her hand and turned the board around. "You go first."

He made a swift motion with his fingers, and a pawn shuffled forwards. She bit her lip and made a move.

He beat her in fifteen moves this time, and in frustration she swept the board and chess pieces onto the floor.

"Marie?"

She turned, startled, to see Professor Xavier wheeling towards her, a kind smile on his face.

"Charles," she said, then flushed. "Sorry. I mean, Professor."

Xavier took in the scattered chess pieces, and then looked at her thoughtfully.

"I take it Erik's personality has not gone completely?" he inquired gently. She shook her head. "And you were attempting to play chess?" She said nothing, but bent down to pick up the pieces. "I imagine that must be difficult."

"Why would you think that?" she challenged, her accent more pronounced than usual.

"You know all his moves, my dear," he said, and positioned himself opposite her. "I haven't had a good game of chess in quite some time. I don't suppose you'd oblige me?"

She bit her lip and her gaze drifted for a moment to Erik, who was standing behind Xavier with a frown on his face. Then she lifted her hands; the pieces rose, then dropped neatly into their places.

"White or black?" she asked, with the faint trace of an accent that wasn't her own.

"White, thank you. I learnt long ago to take the advantage wherever I can."

Rogue smiled faintly. "I know."

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